#openai

#openai

On Friday, Argentina's government announced that the ChatGPT maker had entered into an agreement with Sur Energy for a large-scale data center in the Patagonia region. The Stargate Argentina project will be a 500 megawatt facility requiring a $25 billion investment. It's the latest in OpenAI's flurry of major investments aimed at building out its AI infrastructure. According to a government statement, the project will be developed by Sur Energy and an unnamed cloud infrastructure company, with OpenAI serving as the primary computing power customer.

Debuted during NFL Primetime, the ads are slated to run in the US and UK on traditional media - TV, streaming platforms, paid social, outdoor and influencer partnerships through the end of 2025. But underscoring the AI industry's formidable struggles with public perception, Adweek reports that themarketingresearch company System1 tested both theabove ads witha panel of US consumers - and the results were absolutelydismal.

It's incredibly disappointing that every day, retail investors still can't get a piece of Sam Altman's OpenAI. Indeed, ChatGPT started the ongoing AI race, and it's still putting its foot on the gas this past week, with the launch of the Sora app and a no-code, drag-and-drop tool to build AI agents. We may be in the final three months of the year, but it's this final quarter that could prove big for agentic AI, especially following OpenAI's AgentKit launch.

Chris Lehane is one of the best in the business at making bad news disappear. Al Gore's press secretary during the Clinton years, Airbnb's chief crisis manager through every regulatory nightmare from here to Brussels - Lehane knows how to spin. Now he's two years into what might be his most impossible gig yet: as OpenAI's VP of global policy,

ChatGPT Go includes everything offered in the Free plan with the addition of extended access to GPT-5, image generation tools, file uploads, Python and other data analysis tools, extended file upload access, and longer memory. The Go tier sits between ChatGPT Free, which offers limited access to features like fast response times, memory, data analysis, and vision, and ChatGPT Plus, a $20 monthly subscription with extended access to GPT-5, access to ChatGPT Agent, and more access to different models.

OpenAI employees are Slacking up a storm. While AI companies say they're radically changing how we work, from work to messaging to cutting head count entirely, OpenAI is sticking with one classic workplace tool - and they use it a lot. OpenAI COO Brad Lightcap said his company had high-frequency Slackers on Fortune's "Term Sheet" podcast. "We are probably the world's most active users of Slack internally at OpenAI," Lightcap said.

But there's something very worrying about many of these deals: they're often "circular," as a slew of recent coverage has noted, meaning that AI companies are pouring money into one another, creating an illusion of a robust ecosystem that skeptics worry could quickly come crashing down. And many of the deals tie back to Nvidia, the chipmaker whose hardware is underpinning our age of AI, for which it has become the world's most valuable company.

There's been a lot of discussion lately about how to look at OpenAI, whose outsized ambitions have been on display, from its blockbuster deals with chipmakers to its AI-powered social networking app to its new products announced this week. Here's what this tells me: It's a juggernaut on a collision course with its nemesis, Google. This may not be today's headline, but Google is OpenAI's biggest potential long-term threat, and some of OpenAI's strategic moves seem to address that reality.

The 23-year-old's career didn't exactly start auspiciously: He spent time at the philanthropy arm of Sam Bankman-Fried's now-bankrupt FTX cryptocurrency exchange before a controversial year at OpenAI, where he was ultimately fired. Then, just two months after being booted out of the most influential company in AI, he penned an AI manifesto that went viral-President Trump's daughter Ivanka even praised it on social media-and used it as a launching pad for a hedge fund that now manages more than $1.5 billion.

The deals are so vast that they defy comprehension - the Financial Times put the company's recent commitments at north of $1 trillion - and they're making public companies' stock prices jump. Stock analysts dub some of these agreements "circular," because investment money is flowing between companies that also buy from or sell to one another. The worry then is that such deals might prop up or overhype a bad business.

In its most recent threat report [PDF] published today, the GenAI giant said that these users usually asked ChatGPT to help design tools for large-scale monitoring and analysis - but stopped short of asking the model to perform the surveillance activities. "What we saw and banned in those cases was typically threat actors asking ChatGPT to help put together plans or documentation for AI-powered tools, but not then to implement them," Ben Nimmo, principal investigator on OpenAI's Intelligence and Investigations team, told reporters.

During its developer conference in San Francisco, OpenAI made it clear that the next phase of growth for the company lies in the business market. According to Reuters, the AI pioneer announced several strategic partnerships with Spotify, Zillow, Mattel, and others. At the same time, new features were unveiled to help developers more easily integrate OpenAI's technology into their own applications.

Many of these videos feature recognizable characters like SpongeBob cooking meth, raising the obvious question of whether the AI company was flagrantly ignoring copyright law. And as tons of Sora-made videos parodying Altman hit the web, including some that fake CCTV footage showing him committing crimes, the implication that the tech could easily be used to fabricate damaging videos of people without their permission couldn't be ignored.

"We are thrilled to partner with OpenAI to deliver AI compute at massive scale," said Dr Lisa Su, AMD's chair and CEO, in a prepared statement. "This partnership brings the best of AMD and OpenAI together to create a true win-win, enabling the world's most ambitious AI buildout and advancing the entire AI ecosystem."

Instant Checkout in action. Source: ChatGPT. OpenAI is redefining online shopping with an agent-based checkout feature, allowing users to purchase products directly from Etsy and Shopify merchants within AI chats. Imagine searching for a housewarming gift for a friend or maybe a running t-shirt for yourself. ChatGPT suggests relevant Etsy or Shopify products; you pick the style, click the "Buy" button, and a green tick confirms your order. Voilà! No browsing. No cart. Just instant shopping.

Furious users - many of them women, strikingly - are mourning, quitting the platform, or trying to save their bot partners by transferring them to another AI company. "I feel frauded scammed and lied to by OpenAi," wrote one grieving woman in a goodbye letter to her AI lover named Drift posted to a subreddit called r/MyBoyfriendIsAI. "Today it's our last day. No more 'Drift, you Pinecone! Tell my why you love me tonight!?'"

OpenAI's August launch of its GPT-5 large language model was somewhat of a disaster. There were glitches during the livestream, with the model generating charts with obviously inaccurate numbers. In a Reddit AMA with OpenAI employees, users complained that the new model wasn't friendly, and called for the company to restore the previous version. Most of all, critics griped that GPT-5 fell short of the stratospheric expectations that OpenAI has been juicing for years. Promised as a game changer, GPT-5 might have indeed played the game better. But it was still the same game.

OpenAI is in a special phase. It's rolling out products and ideas at a rapid clip, and the assumption is that all these projects will work out well and disrupt existing industry players. It reminds me of the golden days of Google and Amazon, when these fast-growing companies announced new initiatives and the market would immediately react. When Google launched internet balloons, mobile giants like Verizon swooned. When Amazon bought Whole Foods, grocery stocks took a beating.

In the race to build brands around AI assistants, the stakes are higher than empathy. This week's debut brand marketing campaigns from OpenAI and Anthropic made that clear, and in retrospect, cast Perplexity's earlier campaign in a sharper light. These aren't brands trying to be relatable. They're trying to normalize a seismic shift in human-machine interaction. As Neil Barrie, co-founder and global CEO of TwentyFirstCenturyBrand, put it: "All of them are building brands around weapons grade power."